Free The Women

It wasn’t that long ago when a man couldn’t use the word “girls” without being conclusively deemed sexist. But that was then, and this is now. Michael Powell did something exceptionally risky for a New York Times reporter. He used the word “women.”

The American Civil Liberties Union, whose advocacy on reproductive rights is of more than a half-century vintage, recently tweeted its alarm about the precarious state of legal abortion:

“Abortion bans disproportionately harm: Black Indigenous and other people of color. The L.G.B.T.Q. community. Immigrants. Young people. Those working to make ends meet. People with disabilities. Protecting abortion access is an urgent matter of racial and economic justice.”

This tweet encompassed so much and so many and yet neglected to mention a relevant demographic: women.

As he notes, this wasn’t a mistaken omission, but capitulation to a conflicting demographic, transgender people, who, together with their “allies,” will fight to the death to deny the distinction between those human beings capable of getting pregnant and those who cannot. They’ve manufactured a new language as if to avoid the biology, pregnant persons, persons with a uterus, birthing persons. They reject the biological ability to feed a new life though the milk of a mother’s breast.

Today, “pregnant people” and “birthing people” have elbowed aside “pregnant women.”

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has a section on “Care for Breastfeeding People,” the governor of New York issued guidance on partners accompanying “birthing people” during Covid, and city and some state health departments offer “people who are pregnant” advice on “chestfeeding.”

The Cleveland Clinic, a well-known nonprofit hospital, posed a question on its website: “Who has a vagina?” Its answer begins, “People who are assigned female at birth (AFAB) have vaginas.” The American Cancer Society website recommends cancer screenings for “people with a cervix.”

All this to accomplish one overarching purpose, to “erase” more than half the population in favor of the sensitivities of a minuscule demographic for whom biology stands in the way of their dogmatic demands for recognition.

“Language evolves and it can exclude or it can include,” Ms. Melling noted in an interview. “It’s really important to me that we think about pregnant people. It’s the truth: Not only women give birth, not only women seek abortion.”

And this can’t be accommodated without making the word “women” or “mother” or any of the related permutations epithets uttered only by “transphobic” (although was this has to do with fear is a mystery) that denies the existence of women for the sake of elevating the “existence” of transgender women above them?

At a time when accessibility to legal abortion is at risk, is it worth invoking this tangential fringe issue that serves only to make its discussion more difficult and confusing, to turn away the vast majority of people who support abortion but have no greater desire to adopt gender neutral language than Hispanics want to be called Latinx, and strips the majority of people who will be affected of their involvement? Apparently so, at least to the activists on the left.

Professor Greene questioned the wisdom of activists in insisting that a mass-based movement discard its base and core sexual identity. Why not, for instance, insist that women and transgender men are each embattled when it comes to abortion?

“Activists are adopting symbols and language that are off-putting not just to the right but to people in the center and even liberals,” he noted.

The irony here is that the hill that the most strident activists are willing to die on is one that least serves their purpose. Can’t there be women and transgender people? Can’t there be women who can get pregnant, give birth, breastfeed, and men who perceive themselves to be women and deserve to not suffer discrimination for it? They exist, much as they argue that any dispute as to their demand that they be perceived as much a woman as any other is an attack on their existence.

Feminists, characterized as TERFs for not acquiescing to these calls, refuse to forfeit who they are, what their experiences have been, for the sake of transgender women’s demand to be every bit as much a woman as any other woman. These women, who insist that they are women and people born without a vagina or uterus may well be transgender, but will never know the experience of being a woman, are denigrated by activists for their refusal to stop owning the word,

And now that abortion rights are on the table, the same is happening with politicians who realize that feigning wokeness for the sake of not outraging the most insipid of their base risks alienating the majority of their support and losing the point.

But this month, when word leaked of a potential Supreme Court turnabout, President Biden was unequivocal and practiced in his language choices. “I believe that a woman’s right to choose is fundamental,” he said. “Basic fairness and the stability of our law demand that it not be overturned.”

A few left-leaning congressional representatives have adopted movement language. Representative Cori Bush, Democrat of Missouri, testified last year about “birthing people.” But it is far more common to hear senators and congressional representatives, female and male alike, refer to women. “We cannot go back to the days when women had to risk their lives to end an unwanted pregnancy,” said Senator Bernie Sanders, a democratic socialist who represents Vermont.

The argument constantly raised, whether with regard to childish pronouns or “humanizing” words by making them longer and more unwieldy, is that language “evolves.” Indeed it does, but this isn’t evolution. This is a tiny cohort of unduly passionate believers who believe they are the majority, reflect the only morally correct view and entitled and empowered to ram their solutions down everyone else’s through. This isn’t how evolution works. This is how good intentions backfire.

For this reason he was not surprised when most Democratic politicians declined to echo the language of progressive organizations. “You don’t become a candidate for the presidency or speaker of the House by being dumb about what works in politics,” he said. “Democrats were not going to be afraid to use the word ‘women.’”

There are women. They constitute the majority of America and they’re not going away. Failure to accept this is not going to work. And it need not change the propriety of not discriminating against transgender women, but it could very well prove to be their gravest impediment to social acceptance. There’s enough room for all of us.